Bad Luck on an Otherwise Fine Night

Chuck died on Saturday in New Mexico. Here's his finest work.

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Molly Molloy

Sep 5, 2014

It has been much and properly notedthis week that Chuck Bowden, who died in his sleep last Saturday in Las Cruces, New Mexico, wrote like no one else about the borderlands that were his home — about its violence and beauty, about the obscene war on drugs and those caught up in that grinder, and about the invisible people who lived and died there. Chuck's voice bellowed with tremendous moral force (absent moralism) and his legacy in this regard is large and hopefully lasting, although Chuck himself would have been the first to harbor a jaundiced view of legacies. Esquire was privileged to work with Chuck for years, and to publish much of his work from the border. But the man was an absolute giant, his interests were vast and ranged far beyond the border, and his talent for character was simply extraordinary. When he wrote about the daily routines of Max Cleland, the senator from Georgia who left three limbs in Vietnam, or about Matt Shaunfield, a teenager in Plano, Texas who died of a heroin overdose, or about Gary Webb, who committed the sin of writing a true story about the CIA and drug-running and was destroyed for his troubles, or about what to cook when everyone around you is dying, you could hear Chuck's heart beating in the sentences. That's the tribute we would like to add to the several beautiful tributes already offered this week: Chuck was no niche writer. He was one of the greatest voices of our times, period.

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It has also been noted that phone conversations with Chuck were always long, looping, improvisational jazz, and you could always hear the smoke and wine in his voice. And because he was a kind man and not just brilliant, he would always interrupt himself to say, "You follow me?" He always punctuated his extended solos with that question. And no, Chuck, we almost never did follow, but Lord knows we tried. You were just too far up ahead of us. But what a vantage point that was.

One evening, Matt Shaunfield overdosed on heroin and died. In the past two years, as many as ten more kids in Plano, Texas have died for their love of the drug. This had never happened in Plano. It also had never happened in Austin or Orlando or older or any of the other places in America designed to keep harm away.

She makes coffee in the kitchen while her dead son watches. Barbara Shaunfeld is a bright, friendly woman and last night she nailed an audience of eighteen hundred of her fellow townspeople in a public meeting where she talked about Matt. She quietly read a handwritten statement from a blue spiral notebook, and her words—coming after speeches from the police chief, a local state senator, the mayor, an expert from the DEA, a local doctor—brought the crowd up short. The woman sitting next to me at the meeting had silent tears rolling down her cheeks. Up until late 1996, nobody had officially died of a heroin overdose in Plano, Texas, a rich "edge" city resting on the north flank of Dallas, and that was the way things were supposed to be. Plano, the fifth-fastest-growing city in the United States, was just shy of four thousand people in 1.96o and tops two hundred thousand today, and the people who live here are well-off (the median household income of $58,831 stands tall against the national figure of $35,492; the average home goes for $143,000), tend to make their money in Dallas, and likely have moved here to raise the kids in a place safe from the sins and woes of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Money magazine pegged Plano as the safest spot of its size in the nation. Then the dying came to town.

In the past two years, about a dozen local people, most of them teenagers, have OD'd and died. One local hospital has seen as many as six to eight kids a week who are delivered reeling from enough heroin to put them to sleep forever. The Thursday night meeting follows a Sunday morning when a six-teen-year-old girl fell asleep after snorting heroin with friends and started the week off dead. The street name for the stuff is chiva, a border term decades old, and it's coming to Plano as a mixture of high-grade heroin and antihistamine. For open-ers, you can have it for $2.50 a hit. After you grow to like it, the price bumps up to ten or fifteen bucks.

The town is ripe for some answers, and so is the media—a herd of television vans rumbled outside the auditorium last night, and major dailies like The New York 'limes and USA Today swoop over the city, asking, What is wrong with Plano, Texas? After all, this is where Troy Aikman and a bunch of his fellow Dallas Cowboys bunker down in multimillion-dollar mansions; this is the spot on God's good earth where the empire Ross Perot founded is headquartered; this is the spot adjacent to Southfork, the honest-to-God mansion and spread that was Dallas on televisions around the planet, the host of herds of tourists, largely foreign, who visit the shrine of American greed, viciousness, fine things, and low motives. This is the town of middle managers, folks used to problems, meetings, and options and then sorting out the information and making a decision. And so the big audience (more than triple what the authorities had expected) was very concerned and very calm because it hails from a culture of facts and has no appetite for panic or panaceas or rhetoric. This is a can-do bunch.

That's where Barbara Shaunfield came in. She had spoken only once before about her son, who died on January 2, 1996, and she's still trucking through grief counseling with her husband, John, a high-tech guy who recently sold his company. Six days before last night's meeting, she'd had a hysterectomy. But still she came, decked out in a quiet, dark suit, her short blond hair pleasantly framing her smiling face, and in the calm voice of a PTA president, she told her neighbors about sighting "tiny little blood marks on the sleeve" of Matt's shirt, and she advised them, "I don't know what to tell parents about what works or doesn't work. I just know we tried everything, and none of it works." What she also knows is that her son died at twenty-two and that he was a good son and that he loved her and loved his father and loved his brother and that his love for them and his love of working out and his love of literature, that all of this love buckled before his love of drugs. And this deep love of chemicals coursing through his body turned him into a liar and a drug dealer and a target of the law and a hunted member of society and a dead young man.

Barbara Shaunfield now knows everything that Plano, Texas, was designed to keep its residents from ever having to know. We all share some notions; we all believe that drug addiction happens to someone else, generally to them, and that the woes of the world can be kept at bay by family-centered homes in nice neighborhoods with safe streets, that sports will keep our children safe from harm as surely as garlic and the cross will deter vampires, that we will work hard, put a pool in the backyard, make time to haul the kids to their music lessons, dote on the rec room in the house, save for college, join a decent church, and if we can't run the world, by God, we can raise a family out of harm's way. We all believe this, and we all know it is not true, and that is why we come to Plano: not to find answers but finally to face down our demons. Our ancestors fattened off selling rum, and we still sing folk songs about the Whiskey Rebellion. Under the great Chief Justice John Marshall, it was a less than even bet that the Supreme Court would be sober during any given session, and early travelers to the republic were stunned by the omnipresent public drunkenness. We've been a junkie nation since the beginning, and we have lived through waves of rum, whiskey, gin, over-the-counter opiates, elixirs laced with cocaine, morphine, heroin, speed, and a medicine chest of licit pharmaceuticals, and we've railed against this hunger in ourselves with revivals and prohibitions and narcs and Just Say No! and AA and methadone and endless tricks. We've got dry counties, urine tests, hangovers, and ODs.

And we've got Matthew Scott Shaunfield, Jeffrey James Potter, Jason Wayne Blair, Adam Wade Goforth, Larry Donnell Bramlett, Jeffrey Benton Bedell, Victor Andres Garcia, Mary Catherine Sharp, Milan Michael Malina, George Wesley Scott, Robert Lowell Hill, Erin Emily Baker—all dead of heroin and all Plano's own. Dallas County, the brooding hellhole just to the south, has an estimated twenty-four to thirty heroin deaths a year (Dallas shies away from tallying overdose deaths by specific drugs), and no one has paid much mind to that loss, because it is about them. But when it hits close to home and home is a fine, de-cent place, we snap alert. In 1996, Orlando, Florida, bastion of Uncle Walt himself, lost thirty people to heroin, many of them young. Then there was a cluster of twenty-four heroin deaths in Austin. Five died earlier in 1997 in Boulder, Colorado. A national study in August 1997 found twelve- to seventeen-year-olds tasting smack at a "historic level."

Barbara Shaunfield pours me a cup of coffee and then leads me into the living room. The house runs around s400,000, sports a mansard roof, and has the whiff of a French château. She points out the family portraits, all bunched together on a table, and there is a snapshot of Matt, a clean-shaven, solid kid, and she tells me that's her favorite shot, something about the eyes, she says, that really captures her boy. And then she takes me back to the dining table that rests at the elbow of a big L formed by the spacious kitchen and the mammoth family room, and there over the fireplace is a painting based on the photograph, and Matt looks down with keen eyes, and his eyes have a kind of dreamy quality and that fits, because he was a quirky kid who could have a good time wandering his own imagination, a funny kid always alert to the absurdity of life, and all that is in the painting and peering out from the eyes. There is something else in the painting, a kind of furtive look, the gaze of a hunted animal. And that is part of what Barbara Shaunfield wants to talk about also. She is a woman who knows in her bones how them became us.

I don't trust the answers or the people who give me the answers. I believe in dirt and bone and flowers and fresh pasta and salsa cruda and red wine. I do not believe in white wine; I insist on color. I think death is a word and life is a fact, just as food is a fact and cactus is a fact.

There is apparently a conspiracy to try to choke me with words. There are these steps to death--is it seven or twelve or what? fuck, I can't remember--and then you arrive at acceptance. Go toward the light. Our Father who art in heaven. Whosoever shall believe in me shall not perish. Too many words choking me, clutching at my throat until they strangle any bad words I might say. Death isn't the problem. The words are, the lies are. I have sat now with something broken inside me for months, and the words--death, grief, fear--don't touch my wounds.

I have crawled back from someplace where it was difficult to taste food and where the flowers flashing their crotches in my face all but lacked scent. My wounds kept me alive; my wounds, I now realize, were life. I have drunk a strong drug and my body is ravaged by all the love and caring and the colors and forms and the body growing still in the new silence of the room as someone I knew and loved ceased breathing.

I remember standing in the room with Art's corpse, so warm, his heart had stopped beating maybe a hundred and twenty seconds earlier, and I stood there wondering, What has changed now, what is it that just took place? And I realized that I had advanced not an inch from where I stood as a boy when I held my dying dog and watched life wash off his furry face with a shudder. I do not regret this inability to grow into wisdom. I listen to Chris saying, Good news, two inches of rain at the ranch. Look up at the stout pipe Paul picked for the rope. Hear Dick slowly trying to explain--in words so soft I must lean forward to hear them--why he cannot pick up a plastic horseshoe in the evening light at the nuthouse. Then these pat words show up that people offer me and these pious words slink away like a cur flinching from this new stillness on the wind.

Almost every great dish in Italian cooking has fewer than eight ingredients. Get rid of things or food will be complex and false. In the garden, there is no subtlety. A flower is in your face and is never named Emily. Be careful of the words; go into the bone garden and then taste desire. So it has taken months and it is still a matter of the tongue and of lust. And if you go toward that light and find it, piss on it for me.

The day always begins with the left arm. The clock reads 5:30 or 6:00 a.m. The plaque next to the bed always whispers the same thing: i was given life, that i might enjoy all things. That is it, the glowing numbers announcing the time, the velvet darkness, and then, with the light switched on, the line whispering off the plaque. The body sits up and--this is the hard part to state, because here the words fail--the left arm of the body grabs the left arm of the waiting chair. The body leans forward and begins to arc through the air, and as the body arcs, it is poised over the left arm of the chair, and then it twirls and turns a full 180 degrees and settles into the seat of the chair. Of course, all these words fall short because, while they describe the discrete steps that make up an act, they are like words about a ballet that can never capture the dance. What really happens is that the body moves in one fluid motion, begins in the bed and winds up in the chair, and there is nothing between the two points but a blur. No matter how often the eye tracks this act, it fails to see what it knows must be happening.

Now the workday begins, and the first part of the day is always the hardest part. Not the movement from the bed to the chair. No, not that. The hard part is the motivation. The body can do the work, but first a fire must be lit in the soul. This requires three entire hours--relentless, grueling hours. First prayer, and then exercise. Working the soul, and what remains of the muscle. This part cannot be slighted or the blackness will take over, and then the reel begins playing in the mind, that hideous tape that nothing seems to erase or edit or alter, the tape that zooms in and out of scenes so swiftly the body feels vertigo, and the eye focuses in disbelief on a pin, a small metal grenade pin, and the entire universe--yes, all of it--wrenches to a halt to consider one simple question: Is that pin straight, or is that pin bent? For thirty-one years, since that day the body almost died, the universe has considered this one question.

The workday begins because there has to be a reason for the left arm or there is nothing at all. In three hours, if attention is paid, if that fire is lit in the soul, the body becomes something else, something rare: It becomes Max Cleland, freshman Democrat of Georgia, the lone four-foot-tall, legless, one-armed member of the United States Senate.

So let the workday begin. It is a matter of life and death.

I stood on the edge of our bomb crater, that had been my home for five days and five nights, stretched out my six-foot, two-inch frame, and was caught up in excitement. The battle for Khe Sanh was over and I had come out of it unhurt and alive!

Hector Berrellez is a kind of freak. He is decorated; he is an official hero with a smiling Ed Meese standing next to him in an official White House photograph. He pulled twenty-four years and retired with honors. He is, at least for the moment, neither discredited nor smeared. Probably because until this moment, he's kept silent.

And Hector Berrellez thinks that if the blacks and the browns and the poor whites who are zombies on dope ever get a drift of what he found out, well, there is going to be blood in the streets, he figures — there is going to be hell to pay.

He tells me a story that kind of sums up the place he finally landed in, the place that Gary Webb finally landed in. The place where you wonder if you are kind of nuts, since no one else seems to think anything is wrong. An agent he knows was deep in therapy, kind of cracking up from the undercover life. And the agent's shrink decided the guy was delusional, was living in some nutcase world of weird fantasies. So the doctor talked to Hector about his patient, about whether all the bullshit this guy was claiming was true, about dead men and women and children, strange crap like that. And he made a list of his patient's delusions, and he ticked them off to Hector. And Hector listened to them one by one and said, "Oh, that one, that's true. This one, yeah, that happened also." It went on like that. And finally, Hector could tell the shrink wondered just who was nuts — Hector, his patient, or himself.

Once I walked two hundred miles across this ground and nothing happened but the beat of my heart. Once I sat in the June heat for a week, the temperature in the afternoon banging between 115 and 120, and watched a family of vultures day by day disassemble a dead coyote. Each day the vultures would take a break and line up like penguins at a slimy rock water hole and one by one drink. We lived together for days without a cross word between us.

So that's what I'm going to do before I die. Help create this park. And the word park is just a buzz of sound to contain these memories and to make damn sure this place that does not need me or you or give a damn about us stretches out, untouched, into this thing we call the future. It'll be a weird park. Hardly a road. Hardly a prayer of water. Frightening in the scale of its empty valleys and lonely peaks. And silent. I can't scant this matter of silence. Once I stood in the middle of the Tule Desert in June, and the rains had failed for so very long and there were no insects and the birds in midday hid in the brush and left the sky empty. I must have been thirty or forty miles in any direction from another human being. Suddenly, I could hear this gurgling sound, and behind the gurgles I detected this faint thumping. I snapped alert, looked around for the intruder into my domain. Then I fell into an understanding. I was hearing the blood coursing through my veins, the beat of my heart. That's what I mean when I use the wordsilence: a level of quiet the cemeteries only hear about through rumor. I know a guy who now and then wanders this country, and he once told me, "If you are out there and you find another person out there, you feel violated."

I mentioned to him that my friend Bill Broyles liked to scamper about out there.

The man looked at me and flared, "I've come across his spoor."

It's that kind of country.

It's beautiful, has its checklist of biological treasures and endangered this and that. There are turgid scientific papers measuring its flesh and bones. And I know with this park a bunch of damn rules will come and I will hate every goddamn one. No matter. It's gotta be made safe from us before I die or I'm gonna go to my grave one pissed-off rat.

For the next few years, I'm going to be giving speeches, pressing the flesh in congressional offices, and, late at night sitting in my yard, cursing all the details. But I'm going to help get it done. And when I'm dead, I'm going to be out there. Out there with Ed Abbey and Julian Hayden and Ronald Ives and Malcolm Rogers and early Americans and bighorn sheep and pronghorn and elephant trees and searing heat and hard rock. And silence. And it does not matter whether they toss my body in the local cemetery or burn it to ash. I'll be out there. After that first time, I never left. The desert is with me. It scowls, washes my face with its furnace breath, and at night pounds my head with a billion stars hanging down like ornaments. It doesn't give a damn about me. Or you for that matter. That's not why I'm doing it.